Are you a MySQL or Postgresql scalability expert? Here’s an idea for you. Create and manage a MySQL and/or Postgresql cluster on SliceHost and one on Amazon’s Ec2 cloud. The customers would be people hosting their services in these clouds. Your job would be to manage scaling, security, m...

Just discovered a great article Kiss of Death – Contract Provisions Entrepreneurs Should Avoid at All Costs about dealing with Big Companies from InfoChackie. The mysterious Uncle Saul as he calls himself has a wealth of tips about dealing with what he calls BDC’s (Big Dumb Companies) or...

By now many people have heard of Nassim Taleb’s amazing book Black Swan . This book has completely changed the way I think about the world as a whole and startups in particular. I really recommend you read the book as I can’t possibly do it justice myself. However I will give a brief ove...

I’m sitting at the OAuth Summit held at Yahoo in Santa Clara. We’ve had a brief discussion about the IPR policy negotiation process that has been going on in the background between a few core OAuth people and legal departments in various large companies (most notably Yahoo, Google and Mi...

Great interview with my favorite author Nassim Taleb at The Times. I will write my own review of his theories at some point and how they apply to startups, but until then he gives these 10 tips in the above interview that I think spell them out pretty well. Taleb’s top life tips 1. Scepticism ...

I try to leave politics out of this blog, but I feel really upset about the Proposition 98/99 vote coming up here in California on June 3rd. Any non California residents feel free to ignore this unless you want to learn more about the screwy politics of this state. The Rastas may have invented the t...

It’s easy to get swept into the excitement of the electoral process no matter where you live in the world. In the past couple of months I’ve found myself swept into the excitement for a candidate for the coming US presidential election, who I in reality have very few things to agree with...

Today I released the new version of the OAuth Rails plugin . This finally supports the new “all together now” release of the OAuth Ruby Gem, which Blaine Cook and me have worked hard to merge together from our previous incarnations. I previously posted a guide to how to turn your rails s...

Please, please, please get with the program. Checks are ancient pre industrial age relics that still hang around in a few places in the world. Unfortunately the worlds most dynamic economy the US is still addicted to checks. This makes this article extremely US centric, but it also affects non US re...